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Friday, 30 December 2016

BBC’s prestige drama To Walk Invisible, written and directed
by Sally Wainwright, was a pleasure to watch as it charted the evolution of the
Brontë sisters from homebodies with no prospects, concerned about what will happen
after their father dies as their house is tied (not a problem in the event as
he outlived them all) to published authors.Admittedly it suffered from the common BBC problem of poor sound quality
at times, swelling music over-emphatically directing the viewer’s emotions to
the detriment of being able to hear what was being said.But there was much to admire, particularly in
the scenery (cgi very well used), faithfully recreating Haworth and the
surrounding moors, and reminding the viewer that the parsonage was not isolated
but was part of a thriving, and grimy, industrial district.

Characterisation was plausible, displaying
the mingled affection and irritation which comes from living in each other’s
pockets. Charlotte is the shrewd ambitious
one who nags a reluctant Emily, seeing how brilliant her poetry is. Emily though lacks confidence, hiding it
behind a facade of prickliness and undertaking the bulk of the household chores
while the other two write (there is a lot of the domestic stuff shown,
countering the assumption that writers lead rarefied lives while tending to
reinforce the grim-up-north stereotype).
Anne wants to keep up creatively yet is conscious, as is Charlotte, she
is not quite in the same rank as Emily and Charlotte; perhaps an unfair
depiction as Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have been
reassessed in recent years and found to be surprisingly tough-minded. Useless alcoholic brother Branwell, with
delusions of talent, lacks application and is resentful because of it, knowing
he can get his own way if he is obnoxious enough. And father Patrick is long suffering, always naively
optimistic with no foundation that Branwell’s latest crisis will be a turning
point leading to his recovery, and taking the girls for granted despite his
affection for them. That he is
spectacularly unaware of their prodigious literary activities is brought home
when Charlotte enters his study and to his astonishment diffidently mentions
she is the author of Jane Eyre and it
is doing rather well.

The surprisingly deep bond between Emily
and Branwell is touching, evident when they sit on a five-bar gate with their
heads resting together looking at the moon before baying companionably. On a Sunday morning the sisters walking to
church find Branwell in the lane clutching a wall in a terrible state. They blank him and continue tight-lipped,
suddenly Emily stops and turns round, not to give him a deserved punch in the
kidney but to take him back. The film is
full of such touches: I especially liked the moment where Arthur Bell Nicholls
has helped to bring an incapable Branwell inside, losing his hat in the
passage, and he and Charlotte awkwardly stoop together to pick it up leaving
Arthur on his knee, foreshadowing their marriage; by contrast the homage to Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton with Branwell
out of it was too studied and the effort to endow him with a tragic aspect unwarranted. The suggestion Branwell accidentally caused
Emily’s death from TB three months after his own by coughing blood into her
face as she nursed him is horrifying. He
never gave anything of value to his family, instead bringing chaos and pain
into it.

It struck me afterwards that it would be
possible to map Wainwright’s depiction of the siblings onto Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five (or at least four-fifths of the Famous Five, though the film’s
large but mysteriously little-seen dog obviously intended to suggest the model
for Pilot in Jane Eyre could stand in
for Timmy). So the go-getting and bossy
Charlotte is Julian. In-your-face Emily
is George. Branwell appropriately is
Dick, even if Branwell never follows Charlotte’s orders as Dick does
Julian’s. And pretty Anne Brontë,
dragged along in her sisters’ wake, doubles the feminine slightly drippy
Blytonian Anne. Where the Famous Five go
adventuring on Kirrin Island the Brontë sisters mount expeditions into their
imaginations.

However, the story is not about the
novels themselves, though there are glimpses of what inspired them. Primarily it is about the struggle of the
three sisters to make something of their lives in a world which does not look
favourably on independent female achievement, and attain on their own behalf
the financial security their father’s death would remove and Branwell could
never provide. In true Yorkshire fashion
creativity is allied to business sense, as the scene in which Charlotte, Anne
in tow, descends on her publisher George Smith in London indicates. If practical business also entails an element
of invisibility, such as assuming the pseudonyms Acton, Ellis and Currer in
order for their words to be judged rather than them, so be it.

After a bizarre episode on the moors
with the three sisters backlit – godlike – by a triple sun, an almost transcendental
experience presumably inserted to remind viewer that notwithstanding all the
talk of business their legacy is greater than something merely produced for
money, hackwork, the film more or less concludes with Branwell’s death, his
sisters’ fates relegated to a brief postscript.
Unfortunately, by stopping when it does it makes their sad ends seem subordinate
to that of their feckless and undeserving brother. If he was the centre of attention in life, there
is is no reason he should be in death.

We finish with shots of the parsonage as
it is now, concentrating on the shop selling trinkets which would surely have
made the Brontës’ toes curl. The old place
is certainly a lot cleaner than it was in the 1840s, and I was pleased to see a
healthy ethnic mix looking at the key rings and mugs; as I recall, during my
visit to Haworth the clientele was homogeneously white. But why suddenly insert tacky commercialism
into the moving story of this talented set of writers who have enriched our
culture so profoundly, botching the last moments of a fine two hours of
television?

Wednesday, 14 December 2016

My great-grandfather, Henry James Lockhart,
generally known as Harry (1861-1905), was an elephant trainer, as were his two
brothers Samuel and George.Sam and
George were far better known than Harry, who has rather been forgotten, perhaps
because more of his life was spent in the United States.Research needs to be done to excavate his
career, which may have been as illustrious as his brothers’.

An intriguing anecdote about Harry can
be found in the El Paso Herald from
18 January 1904, p. 8, almost exactly a year before his death. It is headed ‘HARRY LOCKHART, ELEPHANT TRAINER, REACHES MOTHER’S BEDSIDE JUST IN
TIME.’ He was in El Paso, Texas, for a
few days en route to Mexico City
where he was working for Orrin Brothers’ Circus, which had opened a Circus
Teatro building in Mexico City in 1894 (Kanellos, p. 98). El Paso seems to have been his usual
stopping-point and he had good friends in the town.

From the article it can be seen that
Harry was a popular man, described as ‘The famous elephant trainer and
traveler, and prince of good fellows, genial Harry Lockhart’. Harry was a larger-than-life character:
‘“Business is good" wherever Harry goes’ the journalist claimed, before
noting that he had a great reputation as a joker. On a more serious note, the journalist, who
must have sat down with Harry over a few drinks, recounted a dream Harry said he
had had:

‘Mr. Lockhart.
while traveling through the west recently, dreamed that his mother was ill in
Paris. He at once telegraphed to Mrs. Lockhart, who replied that she also had
had a similar dream.’

Presumably at this point his mother was
not unwell, or she would have said so. But a dream was enough to set Harry off to
Paris: the account concludes:

‘That settled it
– Lockhart took the first train for New York, which left in ten minutes, and
from there took the first steamer for Europe. arriving in Paris to find his
mother seriously ill and praying for him to come. Mr. Lockhart has left a host
of warm friends in this city behind him who will be always glad to welcome him
back. He intended leaving yesterday, but his friends. Bloom and O'Brien, hid
his baggage and he could not get away.’

His mother was Hannah Pinder, through
whom the Lockharts are related to the illustrious Anglo-French Pinder circus
family. The dream was most likely precognitive,
because when he had it Hannah was apparently not ill. No more details are given, so the nature of
the ailment is unknown. We do not know
how close in time her dream and Harry’s were, nor precisely how similar.

Hannah was born in 1826 so if the dream
had occurred in 1903, she was 77, an age when a dutiful son might be worrying
about her health. But that would not
explain him making a trip from the western United States to France to see her. He may have made the entire incident up, but
lying about your mother’s health is on a different level to pulling a
journalist’s leg. If he had been telling
a yarn, surely it would have been a better one.

The article’s headline implies Harry
arrived just in time to witness his mother’s demise, but Hannah outlived
Harry. She died in 1910, while Harry
died of pneumonia in Mexico City on 31 January 1905 (family lore says that he
had been out in the rain organising shelter for the elephants), and was buried
in the city’s English Cemetery (Panteón Inglés, Real del Monte.). It was almost exactly a year after the
spectacular death of his brother George on 24 January 1904, when he was crushed
by a runaway elephant at Walthamstow, London.

The El
Paso Herald carried a story on 1 February 1905, p. 3: ‘Mrs. Harry Lockhart,
wife of the well-known elephant trainer, passed through the city yesterday en route to the City of Mexico to join
her husband, who is seriously ill there. “Harry” is well known here and his
numerous friends hope that he may pull through and continue to delight the
circus goers with his famous trained animals.’
Sadly by the time she arrived he was already dead, and there is a
further family story of his wife and young son, also Harry, arriving at the
cemetery as the mourners were leaving it.

Reference

Nicolás Kanellos. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Friday, 9 December 2016

An article appeared inPink News(primary focus of
interest fairly obvious) on 7th December highlighting an article on a website
run by the Spiritual Science Research Foundation (SSRF) which asserts that an
overwhelming reason for homosexuality is possession by a ghost. This is not a good thing as it has a deleterious
effect on the possessed person’s ‘capacity’.
The SSRF article in question is ‘Symptoms of Ghost Affecting or Possessing a Person’ and it includes figures to back
up the argument. It seems ‘about 30% of
the world’s population is possessed by ghosts.’
Only 5% of homosexuality is accounted for by hormonal changes; 10% is
psychological, such as a gay encounter that was pleasurable; and a whopping 85%
originates in ‘spiritual causes’, largely meaning ghosts. Ghosts, it should be added, encompass a
variety of phenomena, not just the expected discarnate spirits: ‘demons,
devils, negative energies, etc.’. The
spiritual perspective is Hindu.

Unfortunately most people don’t realise
they have been infected as only saints, characterised by being above the (scale
undefined) ‘70% spiritual level’, or those possessing an ‘advanced sixth sense’,
can tell. That leaves a huge number of
people possessed by ghosts while unaware of their position. There are ways to diagnose it, but the
symptoms listed are wide-ranging, often vague, and easily confused with other
ailments, presumably why ghosts can get away behaving in this outrageous manner
with impunity. When it comes to sex,
things get complicated. Possession by a
ghost can lead either to an increase or a decrease in the sexual drive, so that
isn’t much help in assessment. There are
however differences according to whether one is possessed by a ghost of the
same of a different sex:

‘If a female
ghost possesses a woman, it attracts other male ghosts either directly or
through the medium of other males possessed by male ghosts. Such women do not
feel the need for getting into a formal relationship with the opposite sex like
getting married. They come up with some excuse or the other to avoid such
relationships.’

So a woman who is single and not in a
relationship is a bad sign. Oddly there
is nothing about the effect a male ghost has when inside a man. Presumably they remain confirmed
bachelors. It gets really interesting
when it comes to cross-sex possession. The
main reason behind men being gay is that they are possessed by female ghosts,
and the female ghosts are attracted to living men. Conversely some women are occupied by male
ghosts and they are consequently attracted to females. The ghost’s consciousness is stronger than
the living person’s and can control it in the desired direction.

This of course presupposes the ghosts
are heterosexual. Would a male gay ghost
inside a woman be attracted to men, and a female gay ghost inside a man be
attracted to females, thus from the outside looking exactly like a non-ghost
heterosexual situation? What about
bisexuals; is that the result of a bisexual ghost, or one with a low libido unable
to exert full control over the host?
Later on there is a reference to ghosts inside married couples, leading
to disharmony, but no mention of the differential effect of the ghost’s sex. Women should either be spinsters or lesbians
according to whether they have a female or male ghost in them so there is some
faulty logic somewhere. The good news is
that this deplorable situation can be combated by practices such as
hypnotherapy, chanting and focusing energy flows. In this way ‘homosexual tendencies and
desires’ can be overcome, though it’s unclear what happens to the invading
entity when the homosexual is freed.

So what about these findings from a body
with science and research in its name, do they bear scrutiny? The first thing to say is that offensiveness
or peculiarity of a claim does not automatically render it invalid. One may have a gut feeling about its
plausibility, but guts are not reliable indicators; it’s the evidence that
counts. So what is the evidence? Unsurprisingly, there does not seem to be
any. The methodology has not been
included to allow others to follow the process.
As far as I can tell the statistics have been plucked out of the air,
perhaps arrived at by a process of meditating and concluding ‘that feels about
right’. If determining the presence of a
possessing ghost is so difficult I’m baffled as to how one could conduct any
kind of survey that would give an accurate figure, assuming of course the idea
of ghosts possessing the living is valid (leaving aside occasional cases where
spirits were said to overshadow the living in the psychical research
literature). The data collection, if it
exists, should be released immediately to allow independent parties to assess it.

Further, there is a page on the SSRF
website which is essentially homophobic, referring to gay parades as becoming
more ‘gruesome’ (i.e. flamboyant), gay pride a form of egotism, and
homosexuality a sign of society in decline: ‘Indulging in homosexual activity
or supporting it invites sin’. Russian
attitudes to gay marches are cited with approval, a stance offensive to anyone
keen to uphold liberal values. The
result of all this gayness, we are warned, will be an increase in
unhappiness. (The counter-argument is
that if you want to see people having a huge amount of fun you could do worse
than witness a gay pride march.) The
suspicion arises that the information presented by the SSRF stems from prejudice,
not scientific research.

Following the Pink News article, Hayley Stevens wrote an article for her blog criticising the SSRF.What was surprising was how, when links were
posted on the Society for Psychical Research’s Facebook page, hostility was
directed at Pink News and Stevens –
not to mention the SPR’s Facebook administrator (OK, me) – rather than at the
SSRF.Some of it seems to have been
because there was actually support for the SSRF’s claim, with resentment at
seeing it criticised, though the support was not overtly specified.Others obviously didn’t bother to read beyond
the headlines and assumed it was Pink
News and Stevens who were saying gay people were possessed by ghosts (it
was generally difficult to disentangle whether comments along the lines of
‘this is crap’ referred to the SSRF’s claim or to the coverage by Pink News and Stevens).There may have been New Age discomfort that
an eastern religion could display bigotry.One or two commenters were firmly of the belief that ‘yeah,
demons’.Possibly others felt such
unsavoury matter should not be given an airing whatever the slant.There was little calm consideration of what
should correctly be called the ‘Spiritual’ Pseudoscience Research Foundation’s
unsupported statements, which was somewhat depressing.

Wednesday, 7 December 2016

The idea of Victorian entertainments
might initially conjure up parlour games of an improving sort, or an evening
round the piano exhorting Maud to come into the garden. The latest free exhibition at the British Library
takes a more expansive look at the world of Victorian show business thanks to
conjuror Harry Evans, aka the Great Evanion.

In 1895 Evans was on his uppers and was
forced by necessity to sell his collection of posters, playbills, sheet music
and other ephemera, some 6,000 items in all, to the British Museum for £20. That was apparently the most the curators
could spend on a single transaction without having to seek approval from the
trustees, who would probably have turned their noses up at the offer.

British institutions are not
particularly noted for having this sort of foresight, but Evans’s loss was a
huge gain for our understanding and appreciation of popular entertainment in
the late nineteenth century. If not the
greatest show on earth, the British Library has conjured up a wonderful little
one to put us in the mood for the festive season.

The exhibition encompasses magic, circus
acts, menageries, mesmerism, dioramas, waxworks, panto and more, together
giving a splendid insight into the way our forebears spent their hard-earned leisure
in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
There are five main sections, devoted to stars of varying kinds, and
degrees of celebrity: John Nevil Maskelyne, Dan Leno, ‘Lord’ George Sanger (a
distant relative of mine), Annie De Montford and the Great Evanion
himself. Why these five were selected is
not made clear, presumably because there is enough available in the archives
relevant to each to constitute a cohesive presentation.

Evanion is not very well known today,
but it would have been impolite to omit him, considering he has largely made
the exhibition possible. He was a
magician who after appearing in front of royalty (there is some dispute about
their precise status) thereafter billed himself as the ‘Royal conjuror’.

Maskelyne was manager of the Egyptian
Hall in Regent Street, ‘England’s Home of Mystery’, in partnership first with
George Cooke and then David Devant.
Egyptian Hall Posters on display tilt at Theosophy in the form of Koot
Hoomi and the Mahatmas, hinting that there was often a seriously sceptical
intent behind Maskelyne’s magic.

De Montford, ‘the psychological star’,
was originally a millworker but carved out a career as a mesmerist, an unusual
occupation for a woman, situated on the blurred line between science and
entertainment. To indicate how popular
mesmerism was, on display is the music for Harry Castling’s song How I Mesmerise ‘em, as sung by Charles
Gardener.

Sanger was the purveyor of ‘something
new under the sun, twice daily’, as both a travelling circus impresario and
later at Astley’s Amphitheatre. A copy
of his 1908 autobiography is in one of the cases, and its title, Seventy Year a Showman, does not seem an
exaggeration. Next to it is a ‘memoir’
by one of his acts, Toby the learned pig, which I think it can be assumed was
ghost-written.

Finally, tucked round the corner is a
section devoted to George Wild Galvin, better known as Dan Leno, comic singer and
versatile performer, including as a clog dancer and pantomime dame. He was allegedly the funniest man on earth
(in admittedly a fairly small field).

The star attraction of There Will Be Fun has to be the
wonderful posters. They conjure up the
greasepaint and sawdust and are marvels of the printer’s art. Designed to be disposable, it seems a miracle
they have survived in such fine condition.

Bulking out the gems from the Great
Evanion’s collection there are films, such as one from 1902 of Dan Leno’s
family larking about in the garden, and early sound recordings. Further objects have been loaned by the Magic
Circle, including rather oddly the spend-a-penny toilet lock invented by
Maskelyne.

As well as the archival material, there
are new films of actors recreating the old routines, and supplementing the exhibition
is a series of live performances in the library – probably mounted in the name
of ‘access’ but all to the good if it focuses attention on the collection. The curators have dressed the display in a
gorgeous red circus-themed paper with evocative gold text to reinforce the
Victorian atmosphere.

Performing was one way someone from
humble origins, with talent and some luck, could carve a lucrative career in a
society where opportunities for social mobility were limited. Sadly though, a lot of the greats who
dedicated their careers to entertaining our ancestors came to unfortunate ends. Of those showcased here, Annie De Montfort
died in 1882 at the age of 46; Dan Leno spent time in an asylum and died in
1904 aged 43; impoverished, Harry Evans died in 1905 in Lambeth infirmary of
throat cancer; George Sanger was murdered with an axe in 1911.

However, their legacy lives on in this excellent
little exhibition and for anybody dropping in to see it one thing is certain –
there will be fun! It runs until 12
March 2017.

Sunday, 4 December 2016

It is easy to forget quite how young
Robert Mapplethorpe was when he died in 1989.
The exhibition currently on display at the Alison Jacques Gallery in
Berners Street, London, was mounted to commemorate what would have been his
70th birthday. Juergen Teller has
collaborated with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York to choose 48
images. encompassing Polaroids and silver gelatin prints, spread over two
floors. A note at the entrance wisely
points out that the contents are not suitable for children, though they can all
be found on the gallery’s website.

I can’t make up my mind what I think
about Mapplethorpe’s photographs, and my visit didn’t help clarify my
opinion. They were ably selected by
Teller (a good choice of curator for such challenging material), but on this
showing what mainly distinguishes Mapplethorpe was his indifference to taboos
surrounding the explicit depiction of male genitalia and anuses, and I’m not
sure the intention to provoke, which must have been an element of his method,
is enough to put him in the first rank of photographic artists.

That said, there is a lot more to him
than naked men, and this was a welcome reminder of the variety of subjects at
which he pointed his camera. There are
still lifes and animals as well as the portraits for which he is best known. Patti Smith is present of course, but not
wearing a shirt, in fact not wearing anything up top at all as she presses her
breasts to a window pane, hands up in a pose evoking Maya Derren and so
reinforcing Smith’s credentials as a significant artist.

Mapplethorpe is particularly adept at
juxtapositions, whether with the contents of an image – a small statue of a
devil with a pitchfork about to spear a penis looking like a hotdog – or titles
– a classical statue with its arms flexed, as if stretching after sleep, called
‘The Sluggard’. Gisèle Freund was
photographed with one of her pictures of Virginia Woolf on a shelf next to her,
rather a startling addition to a Mapplethorpe.
One wonders what Woolf would have made of all this.

In aesthetic terms the still lifes work
well: eight frogs on a plate (or is this a portrait? – you don’t expect a still
life to have the capability to jump), seedpods, bread in profile at first
glance looking unsettlingly like dung; but inevitably they are secondary to the
explicit depictions of the human form,
These often have a playfulness and sense of collaboration which
neutralises any sense of seediness they might otherwise have had. If it should seem crude on occasion, most
notably in the explicitness of ‘Fist Fuck’, that says more about the prejudices
of the viewer than it does about the photographer.

Mapplethorpe clearly had a way with
people to earn such trust, and his empathy is revealed in the connection he makes
with his subjects, but my favourite of the whole show has to be the dog Muffin
pictured looking like an indolent nineteenth-century French courtesan. Some of the other work is a little obvious or
doesn’t quite succeed – ‘Corn’, in which a cob inevitably looks like a penis; a
pair of cocoanuts resembling breasts; a grid of apartment windows marred by an
ugly shadow that would be frowned on in a club competition; a long exposure
making flowing water look velvety (‘Puerto Rico’), already a cliché in 1981
when it was taken.

Such reservations notwithstanding, Teller
is to be congratulated on choosing an interesting group, as is Alison Jacques
for showing it. I would have liked to
have seen more of Mapplethorpe’s corpus so finely printed, but am grateful
these have been made available. I’m
still agnostic on their lasting value, but you could never say Mapplethorpe was
a dull personality, nor, with the odd exception (the 1982 one of a television
is surprising in its banality), producing boring photographs.

Wednesday, 23 November 2016

In March 2015 I outlined the reasons why I did not feel it sensible to leave money to the
Society for Psychical Research in my will.The Society had been the beneficiary of a significant bequest from late
Nigel Buckmaster but was not in my opinion using it wisely.Since writing that, my attitude towards
leaving money to the SPR has not changed.What has changed is that in
mid-2015 the organisation moved from its rented premises in Marloes Road,
having purchased a three-story building in Vernon Mews, West Kensington.The move was forced on the Society by the
landlord at Marloes Road ending the tenancy, and it made sense to buy rather
than carry on renting.The choice of suitable
property was limited but, while far from perfect, the new premises are
definitely better than the old cramped office and library.

The latest issue of the SPR’s magazine Paranormal Review has an interesting
article by the Hon. Treasurer Dr Richard Broughton on the formidable logistics
of the move, which had to be done in a very short period to meet the date the
landlord had set. It was a stressful
operation, and fitting out the building to suit the Society’s needs was lengthy
and expensive. Broughton’s article
states the cost of the move, which is fairly eye-watering: the purchase price
was £1.2m, with another £100,000 for fees and the necessary refurbishment.

The Hon. Treasurer concludes by launching an appeal
for funds, noting: ‘Our first donor was Mr Nigel Buckmaster who, you might say,
foresaw our needs and allocated a portion of his generous bequest to the
Society that amounted to £263,000. That
leaves a little over a million pounds to raise and we need your help.’ To facilitate the appeal a ‘Building Fund
Committee’ has been established, and a couple of days ago a ‘New Home Campaign’
donate button appeared in a prominent position on the website, though a new
home campaign sounds more like something you do to get a new home than start
after you have obtained it (and paid for it).
There are enticements to donors in Broughton’s pitch: opportunities to
name the library and lecture hall, though no figures are mentioned.

Mr Buckmaster certainly referred to the purchase of
a building in his will, but did not specify any particular amount; he could
hardly have known precisely how much his estate would be worth after his
death. That £263,000 was what was left
after other Buckmaster projects had been allocated from the bequest which, with
growth, amounted to some £750,000. To
put it in perspective, from the Buckmaster funds the SPR will have spent more
on the new website and online encyclopaedia – a budget of £350,000 – than was
allocated to new premises.

The back page of the magazine is devoted to the
appeal under the call ‘Help Build Your Society’, noting the symmetry between
the £1.3m spent and 1.3 centuries of the SPR’s existence (134 years). ‘To be able to realise this dream [i.e. a new
home] in London’s heated property market we had to dig deep into our financial
reserves. Now we need your help to
recoup this ‘advance’ and help us pay for our new home.’

I’m all for the SPR having a healthy financial
position of course, but less sanguine about how it spends its money (including
how little it spends on supporting research).
It’s good news it has its own spacious property, both a valuable asset
and a base to provide a better service than was the case at Marloes Road. But the appeal subtly suggests that having
spent this large sum on the Vernon Mews property, the Society is now a bit
strapped for cash. It doesn’t mention
that the last building the SPR owned and rented out for many years, 1 Adam
& Eve Mews, just off Kensington High Street, was sold for £800,000. Nor does it refer to the difference between
the proportion from the Bucknmaster bequest allocated to the new home and the
amount the bequest was worth in toto,
which comes to nearly half a million pounds.

My attitude is still that it would have been better
to have used the money the Society already had more wisely than squander it and
have to replenish it. For example, to
simply replace the Buckmaster money given to Council member Dr David Rousseau
for personal projects yet to show their worth will necessitate raising
£78,000. Perhaps the appeal will bring
in the required million, but I am doubtful in the present financial climate, not
to mention the fact the Society actually already had the £1.3m necessary
without having to ask. On the other hand
someone may fancy having the rather elegant library named after them.

Friday, 18 November 2016

I have long had an interest in Felix
Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926); in 2008 I was photographed standing next to his statue
in Minsk, Belarus, then earlier this year standing by his grave at the Kremlin
wall near Lenin’s Mausoleum (the plaque marking the final resting place of the
remains of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, is just visible on the left,
between the trees). So I was intrigued
by the title of a talk, given on 15 November at the University of Cambridge
Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities by Iain
Lauchlan of the University of Edinburgh in the series ‘Conspiracy &
Democracy’, called ‘Conspiracy in the Kremlin: Who (or what) killed Felix
Dzerzhinsky’.

The talk hinged on Dzerzhinsky’s sudden
death after a two-hour speech to the Central Committee on 20 July 1926 in which
he had been critical of Stalin. The
cause given was heart attack. But was it? Could it have been murder, and if so, who
could have been responsible? Was this an
early move by Stalin to remove possible opposition and consolidate his own grip
on power?

‘Iron Felix’ is best known for his role
in the Soviet revolutionary government as head of the All-Russian Extraordinary
Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known as the
Cheka, though he was also appointed Commissar for Internal Affairs which I
suppose would be the equivalent of the British Home Secretary also being head
of MI5. Trusted by Lenin, he was
ruthless in pursuing counter-revolutionaries and other enemies of the
Bolsheviks.

Minsk, 2008. Photo: Keith Ruffles

Operating in ways not unlike those of
the old Tsarist Okhrana, his approach was not above criticism: Victor Serge
argued that a transparent system would have achieved its results as
efficiently, but with more justice.
Dzerzhinsky on the other hand felt this was a life-or-death struggle and
half measures could lead to disaster. As
Lauchlan put it in noting how dependable Dzerzhinsky was, if you had to break
eggs to make an omelette, Dzerzhinsky was a man who could be relied on to break
them honestly. It was a position that
could attract a sadist who might go beyond what was necessary whereas he did
not like the job so would not use it for personal gratification. His colleagues did not feel his methods were
excessive.

Dzerzhinsky died in the Kremlin in
mysterious circumstances and rumours swirled around his death immediately,
particularly in the foreign and émigré press, his sudden demise used by
opponents of the regime to suggest it was a sign of internal dissension. There was a Russian tradition of violence in
the Kremlin, notably Ivan the Terrible killing his son in 1581, and by evoking
that murderous history Dzerzhinsky’s death was bound to create conspiracy
theories.

Moscow, 2016. Photo: Karen Ruffles

The suspicion arose that the regime was
encountering its Thermidor, a parallel with the situation in France when the
Reign of Terror was brought to an end in 1794 and its leading light,
Robespierre, guillotined. By this
interpretation Dzerzhinsky was the Soviet Robespierre and his death represented
the government, post-Lenin, in crisis (more positively it could have been
interpreted as the often arbitrary repression he represented easing as the
government stabilised under the New Economic Policy, but from an anti-Bolshevik
perspective it made sense to accentuate negative interpretations).

There were a number of colleagues who
could have wanted Dzerzhinsky out of the way, representing a variety of shades
of opinion. Suspects included Trotsky, Zinoviev,
Kamenev and Bukharin. They had all had
areas of disagreement with their late comrade.
However, Lauchlan emphasised firstly that Dzerzhinsky argued with both
wings, putting him in the middle; and while he disagreed on some things,
equally he agreed on others. There was
no single aspect of policy which might want someone to have him killed.

Significantly, Stalin was not mentioned
at the time as a moving force in a possible murder. Nor did Stalin accuse any of those he
eliminated later of having orchestrated Dzerzhinsky’s death when he could
easily have done so, though Lauchlan did mention that Stalin had planned to
include the possibility of his murder as part of the allegations in the
Doctors’ Plot shortly before his own death.
Stalin was capable of accusing others of acts he had authorised, so it
would have been easy for him to point the finger, even if evidence was lacking
or had to be manufactured. Later a rumour
circulated that Stalin had had Dzerzhinsky killed because as head of the Cheka
the latter had uncovered evidence Stalin had once been an Okhrana agent, though
this turned out to be baseless.

So if accusations of a conspiracy were
lacking in 1926, why did they emerge later?
Lauchlan argued that it is easy to interpret history backwards, reading
motives into events retrospectively because we know what takes place next. Further, history can become a kind of soap
opera in which everything occurs for a reason.
Properly constructed drama does not allow for random forces, it requires
motivated individual acts. From that
point of view it is easier to see Dzerzhinsky’s death as part of a wider scheme
than acknowledge he just dropped dead from a heart attack.

There were a number of deaths in the
senior Soviet hierarchy in the 1920s and 30s which happened at opportune
moments, and if one thinks in terms of conspiracies then these could be
regarded not as coincidences but acts by the state to purge dissent. However, Lauchlan’s view is that Stalin’s
paranoia only developed after the suicide of his wife in 1932, after which he
gradually became insular within a limited clique. By the time of Sergei Kirov’s murder in 1934
he was ready to implicate a wide range of rivals, and order purges using the
pretext of a widespread conspiracy. The
political landscape was entirely different to that of 1926, when Stalin had
walked with other leading Bolsheviks behind Dzerzhinsky’s coffin.

Assuming Dzerzhinsky’s death was from
natural causes, what more can we say about the man? For Lauchlan this touches on leadership as performance
(curiously Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who happened to be in Moscow at
the time, attended his funeral). With
his distinctive beard and sinister reputation, Dzerzhinsky consciously
projected himself as a Mephistophelean character. He admired Robespierre, and saw himself in the
same heroic mould.

In pursuit of that image and harbouring
a feeling of having a higher purpose, it looks like he had a death wish. He was not averse to putting himself in
dangerous situations and despite a history of ill-health, including previous
heart attacks, he effectively worked himself into an early grave, ignoring
doctors’ advice to slow down. He perhaps
saw himself as a secular saint, sacrificing himself for the revolution, and
there is a remarkable group photo, suppressed until the 1990s, with him in the
centre which echoes The Last Supper;
he even appears to have a halo behind his head.
It may be relevant that as a youth he had at one point intended to enter
a seminary.

Lauchlan outlined a possible cause for
this sense Dzerzhinsky possessed that he was somehow destined to
martyrdom. He had had tuberculosis in
1901 which inculcated in him the feeling he was between life and death, engaged
in a superhuman struggle with the enemy within, just as he struggled against
another kind of enemy within as head of the Cheka. He wanted his life to have meaning, but
turned the desire in a pathological direction.
The irony is that after his death an autopsy, conducted by the foremost
authority on TB in the country, revealed no trace of the disease – a conclusion
there was no reason to fabricate.
Dzerzhinsky had based his approach to life on a false premise.

For all his faults, Dzerzhinsky created
an iconic role model that endures today.
He is still popular in Russia at both official and public levels as a
symbol of integrity, and there is a movement to bring his statue, pulled down
in 1991 and currently languishing in the fallen statue park at the Central
House of Artists, back to its original position outside the Lubyanka. He is not so popular in Poland (he was an
ethnic Pole) and his statue in Dzerzhinsky Square in Warsaw came down in 1989,
the square given back its pre-war name.
As the existence of a statue in Belarus attests, the authorities there
are quite positive towards his legacy.

The lecture’s title was somewhat
misleading in emphasising the ‘who’ over the ‘what’. One was expecting a surprise contender for
Dzerzhinsky’s assassin, perhaps a name hidden in state archives for decades, so
it was a slight anti-climax to learn he did actually die of a heart attack
after all. That is an indication of our
hankering after conspiracies, life as soap opera. Despite the disappointment it was still an
interesting profile, showing there was more to Dzerzhinsky, and greater nuance,
than is suggested by his image as director of the brutal state security
apparatus. Dr Lauchlan has a biography
in press – Iron Felix: Death, Tyranny
& the Pursuit of Happiness in Revolutionary Russia, 1877-1926 – which
will be well worth a look.

Update 18 September 2017

I
have expressed a rather optimistic interest in visiting all of the statues of
Felix Dzerzhinsky in existence, of which apparently there are a couple of dozen
across Russia, but now I find there is another to add to the list. On 5
September a new statue was unveiled in the Russian city of Kirov (named after
the Leningrad party boss who was assassinated in 1934), some 500 miles east of
Moscow. An imposing 8 ft 6 in. tall and weighing 2 tons, it stands in the
courtyard of the regional FSB veterans’ association which, while it’s not
exactly the Lubyanka, is an appropriate spot. There is a short YouTube
video of the unveiling, with the laying of many flowers at his feet, and a fine
statue it looks, Felix standing erect and proud as if he was still set to
defend the Revolution from its class enemies.

Kirov
may seem an unlikely spot, but the project was the initiative of a group of local
FSB ‘veterans’, supported by labour organisations in the area. The statue
was paid for by private donations, though the city was happy for it to be
erected, with a strong majority in favour on the local council. There was
already a commemorative plaque to Dzerzhinsky on the veterans’ association
building and the addition of a statue was the culmination of a long campaign.
The ostensible reason for the location – that Dzerzhinsky twice visited
the city, in 1898 and 1919, when it was known as Vyatka – seems somewhat weak,
but the sponsors needed some kind of justification, and they go on in more
general terms to praise Felix’s positive contribution to ’the struggle for
mankind’s bright future’, as Viktor Kolpakov, the director of the regional FSB
veterans’ association, said to the city’s council. To be fair Dzerzhinsky
did stay, with Stalin, in the building which now houses the association while
in town during the Civil War.

The
new statue has been getting some coverage: Ben Macintyre wrote an article in
Saturday’s Times with the alarmist title ‘Lenin’s architect of red
terror rises again: Decades after Soviet statues were destroyed it is chilling
to see Putin put up a new one of Felix Dzerzhinsky’. While it is a little
unfair to lay this directly at the desk of Mr Putin, it is doubtful it would
have happened had he been opposed to the idea, and it is reasonable to assume
Putin would have sympathy for Dzerzhinsky’s methods from the days when you
didn’t have to bother pretending to be democratic.

Also
on Saturday, Radio 4’s ‘Archive on 4’ programme was devoted the current fashion
for tearing down statutes that embody values now considered offensive,
including those commemorating Confederate leaders in the United States and the
mass slaughter of Lenins in Ukraine. Kirov was given as an unusual
counter-example bucking the trend, but of course it shows that if there is a
sufficiently strong fan base and limited opposition, you can memorialise
anyone. There are critics in Kirov, such as relatives of those who
suffered under the Soviet regime, feeling much the same as people elsewhere for
whom such statues are unwelcome reminders of dark times, but their opinions
count for little compared to FSB veterans'.

Tuesday, 15 November 2016

Once again the film festival organised by Rory Finin,
director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, a centre in the Department of Slavonic
Studies at the University of Cambridge, has brought Ukraine to the Winstanley
lecture theatre at Trinity College in Cambridge for two evenings, 11-12
November.The past couple of festivals
unsurprisingly had a major focus on Maidan and the political turmoil which has racked
Ukraine, with the emphasis on documentaries exploring filmmakers’ responses to
the crisis.The ninth festival returned
to the more traditional format of mixing documentaries portraying broader
perspectives on the lives of contemporary Ukrainians with classic fiction.The festival was run in collaboration with
the Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival and the
Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre.

The first film on Friday evening was a short, Has-Beens (Olena Moskalchuk and Dmytro
Burko, 2015), about the Petrivka book market next to the railway line in
Kyiv/Kiev. Opening with the sounds of
the trains as the camera tracks along a passageway lined with books, we are
introduced to a world the twenty-first century seems to have forgotten: a
market crammed with decaying books, piled high and scattered around, but few
customers for them. One seller sadly
notes people don’t read these days, while a smartly dressed man hunts only for
books not available as digital versions.

Many of the units are shuttered and it must be a
long time since this forlorn space saw any kind of bustle. One wonders how the market keeps going, with
customers haggling over books that are relics from another era, as the one
containing pictures of a young and old Lenin amply demonstrates. Yet the sellers and their customers are in
good humour, boasting and telling jokes.
There is even an effort to repair books that might have to wait a long
time to find a loving owner. It is
heartening to see the occasional young person browsing, but on this showing the
second-hand book trade is not in good health.
A rather sad film for bibliophiles, but more context to allow the viewer
to gauge Petrivka’s position in the world of Ukrainian bookselling generally
would have been useful.

The second documentary of the evening was
feature-length, and also dealt with a vanishing world: Hollywood on the Dnipro: Dreams from Atlantis (Oleh Chornyi, 2014),
Rory pointing out that the title is a nod to the Odessa Film Studio’s nickname
of ‘Hollywood on the Black Sea’. Hollywood on the Dnipro charts the rise
and decline of the village of Buchak, about 150 km from Kiev, as a destination
for filmmaking during the Soviet era.
Alexander Dovzhenko, who proclaimed the area ‘Ukraine’s Switzerland’,
planned to shoot his final film, Poem of
the Sea, here. After his death in
1956 his widow Yuliya Solntseva undertook the project, and the association gave
Buchak a boost that attracted other projects throughout the 1960s and into the
70s.

Over the years a significant number of directors
arrived, taking full advantage of the picturesque rural setting. Andrei Tarkovsky, who used it to great effect
in his debut feature Ivan’s Childhood,
may have been the most notable, but there was a roll-call of directors in what
seems to have been a renaissance in Ukrainian cinema paralleling New Wave
movements elsewhere in Europe. An enthusiasm
hinting at boundless possibilities is on display in these films. As dyed cows in one suggests, the area somehow
lent itself to play, a poetic approach bordering on surrealism. It could be that the feeling of remoteness
from government strictures encouraged a sense of escape, though there could not
be total freedom from state censorship.

The filmmakers talked to those who worked on the
films, both sides of the camera, as well as locals who remembered the
productions and often acted in them as extras.
Tarkovsky’s Ivan himself, Nikolai Burlyayev, discusses the film and its
director while Larisa Kadochnikova, who spent a year filming Ivana Kupala Night here in the 1960s,
is given a tour as she tries to pick out landmarks half a century later.

The second part of the film’s title comes from the
fact that today the village has largely disappeared under water. In the early 1970s, against fierce local
opposition, the Soviet government authorised the Kaniv hydropower plant which
entailed building a reservoir. Some
residents moved to abandoned dwellings above the water line but most were
relocated to other villages where they had to build their own houses with no
government assistance. As a result
Buchak has been left almost completely deserted, its famous windmill which appeared
in many films fallen into decay, though it remains home to a handful of
bohemians who value the solitude.
Towards the end there is a shift from celebrating Buchak’s cinematic
heritage to highlight the fragile ecosystem and the environmental degradation,
with activists fighting to prevent further flooding and preserve the natural
beauty along with sites of archaeological significance.

The film’s writer Stanislav Tsalyk, who also
appeared in the film, was present to introduce it, and do a Q&A afterwards,
though the latter turned out to be a single question from Rory and an extremely
lengthy answer that covered most of the questions the audience might have
asked. Tsalyk pointed out some of the
problems making the film, notably that many of those who had been involved
during the village’s golden age had died or moved away, reducing the number of
people they could interview. Memories
were fallible because those who had acted in the films only actually saw them
once DVDs became available because there were no cinemas close by, and no
electricity. He added that the films
discussed are only a slice of those which used Buchak as a location.

This was an important oral history of the Dnieper’s
very own dream factory, bringing to light a significant aspect of Ukrainian
cinema. There was undoubtedly an
atmosphere of nostalgia and loss hanging over Hollywood on the Dnipro, but it was too an indicator that such
excitement and experimentation can once again energise the country’s film
making, and reinforce national identity in the process.

Saturday’s screenings, Two Days (Heorhii Stabovyi, 1927) and The Night Coachman (Heorhii Tasin, 1928), were a complete change of
pace, two gripping hour-long dramas that were a fascinating alternative to the
didacticism of Sergei Eisenstein’s films in the same period (though a shot of a
sleeping stone lion in Two Days may have
been intended to echo the first of the famous trio of lions in Eisenstein’s
1925 Battleship Potemkin). Where Eisenstein’s primary concern was the
movement of the masses, subordinating the individual and assuming a common
motivation based on class, these two films examined the human cost,
particularly intergenerational frictions, as a new world was born, leaving
those who were stuck firmly in the old in confusion and despondency. There were commonalities between the two:
both show the brutal execution of a child who has joined the Communists – a son
in Two Days, a daughter in The Night Coachman – at the hands of the
Whites, and the revenge of the aged father, culminating in death or despair. In each case the father (a widower) is out of
sympathy with his offspring’s views, but aghast at the way the Whites, with
whom he naturally feels an affinity, behave.
However, in neither case is the retributive act carried out from class
consciousness, but from a more visceral hatred of cold-blooded murderers.

The evening began with Two Days. A wealthy
bourgeois family flees before the advancing Reds, leaving their elderly
retainer to look after the house. During
the loading of the car a puppy is accidentally killed, a seemingly minor act in
the scheme of things but the beginning of a chain of events which drives the
tragedy. The Reds arrive and the old
servant is astonished to find his son with them, someone he had thought dead in
the war but who is now a commissar. The
young man though makes it clear his loyalty is to the Revolution. His father is hiding the young son of the
family in his attic room, at considerable risk to himself, as the youngster had
been left behind in the confusion.
Unfortunately the puppy’s body is dug up by its mother and this leads to
the Reds finding a chest with the family’s valuables, buried for safekeeping. They remove the chest but the boy in hiding
mistakenly thinks the old man had told the revolutionaries of its whereabouts,
and when the Reds retreat and the Whites come back, he denounces his erstwhile
protector. The commissar had been
ordered to remain undercover but the boy betrays his hiding place, the Whites
find him and promptly hang him from the tree under which chest and puppy had
been buried. The old man in his agony
burns the house, killing everybody in it, including the boy, before himself
expiring on the road.

In depicting the conflict Stabovyi does not create the
simplistic dichotomy of noble Reds and dastardly Whites one might expect in the
1920s. The former are a boorish lot with
bad manners, whereas the Whites are cultivated and at least know how to play
the piano (and don’t put lit cigarettes on it).
But the Whites are ruthless when it comes to dealing with the captured commissar. The old man’s political sympathies are
entirely with them but he still has personal loyalties, and cannot reconcile
the two. Not seeing where his true interest
lies is his tragedy. Thus he experiences
false consciousness by allying himself to the bourgeoisie, sheltering an
ungrateful youth who symbolically takes his bed while he has to sleep on the
floor. At one point the old man sits in
his room and fondles his old Imperial Army cap.
He sighs that those days are long gone, and indeed they are. Alone, with nothing left to live for, his
time is over as a new society rises from the ashes of the old.

The
Night Coachman is a story about an elderly coach
driver who has worked nights for 30 years, living comfortably with his daughter
who is employed, so he thinks, at a printing works. In fact she is a Communist, secretly producing
revolutionary literature. Her father
discovers that she is no longer at the works and is associating with, in his
eyes, bad company, a fellow radical. The
pair have stashed printing equipment in the loft above the stable, and thinking
to save her, the father brings in a ruthless counterintelligence officer when
he believes the young man will be in the loft alone. Unfortunately the daughter is there instead,
with incriminating evidence. In a
chilling scene the officer forces the old man to drive them to the
mortuary. After telling the custodian
there is a body for him while the camera shows the daughter sitting passively,
the officer shoots her (in practice one would have expected him to interrogate
her to find out as much as possible about her network, but the scene is
superbly dramatic).

The following day the old man is in a daze, out in
his carriage in daylight for the first time in decades. He sees at a street
corner the officer interrogating the very person with whom his daughter had
associated, and when the man is detained the officer orders the father to drive
them to – the mortuary. The father whips
up the horse, tells the young man to jump, and crashes the carriage on some
steps. His impulsive act kills the
officer and the horse, and leaves him dazed and injured as the film ends with
him reaching for the scarf he had earlier given his daughter as a gift.

Technically the film is a marvel, with a great deal
of night shooting done on location in Odessa.
Early on there is a sequence where the old man is driving the officer
and the latter sees a pretty woman in another carriage. He orders the old man to speed up and drive
alongside, then he hops into the other vehicle to exercise his charms on the
lady. It is similar to a sequence in
Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
(1929) in which the camera in a car drives next to another car, filming its
occupants; perhaps this is where Vertov got the idea.

As is the case in Two Days, an old man furthers the revolutionary cause, but not from
radical motives: here it is to atone for causing the death of his
daughter. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 film Mother has a mother and son pitted
against each other initially; however, she comes to understand the system’s
injustice after seeing the harsh way it treats him, and she adopts his
revolutionary outlook. Both Stabovyi and
Tasin by contrast demonstrate that the way individuals respond to reality is
not always so neat. Ultimately, if one
cannot change one’s views in accord with the forces of history, the forces of
history will roll over you. The old, as
symbolised by the father, will give way to the new, albeit at the cost of great
sacrifice on both sides.

Rory Finin is doing a fine job organising the
festival and bringing us gems. As well
as familiar faces it consistently attracts those new to Ukrainian film, and the
number of students willing to give up the more usual pleasures of weekend nights
(or even Radio 4’s Any Questions?,
which was being recorded at the Cambridge Union at the same time on Friday
evening) is testament to its attractions.
Watching the clips in Hollywood on
the Dnipro made me realise just how many films Rory could potentially
programme for future festivals. Next
year (coincidentally the centenary of the Russian Revolution) will mark the
tenth. There is no shortage of potential
material so there is scope, budgets willing, for an expanded festival, perhaps
occupying all day on the Saturday. The
festival has always been free, but I am sure that a charge to help defray the
extra costs would not deter attendants.
I hope Rory will consider pushing the човен out and making the tenth
festival of Ukrainian film even more enjoyable than the preceding nine.

Friday, 11 November 2016

Cambridge
University Library (CUL) is currently the venue for an exhibition of curious
objects called, appropriately, Curious Objects.On show are some of the
unusual items held by the Library in this second public presentation to mark the
institution’s 600th anniversary, the purpose to stress that there is
a lot more to the collections for which it has responsibility than books and
manuscripts.Many of the items were accumulated
by individuals or picked up as curiosities and came into the library’s
possession by chance.Others were seen
as expanding the idea of the library as a repository for the written word to
include supplementary material which aided study.Occasionally the Library has acquired an
institutional archive intact, artefacts arriving as a by-product of records.Sometimes books obtained under the Copyright
Act have extra bits bundled in.Over the
years many pieces have been transferred to other repositories within the
university, but there is still a lot in the vaults with which to compose a
wonderfully eclectic miscellany.

Among
the ancient Egyptian pots, facial hair sent to Charles Darwin, Soviet ephemera,
footwear and so on is a case devoted to items drawn from the archives of the
Society for Psychical Research which, though in the care of CUL, are still the
property of the SPR and shown with its permission. The most eye-catching, and frequently
mentioned in publicity, is undoubtedly the ‘ectoplasm’ retrieved from medium
Helen Duncan after a séance in Portsmouth.
The soft lighting displays the fabric beautifully even as it undermines
any claim to paranormality. Alongside it
is a page from an SPR report of a 1931 séance with Mrs Duncan.

At
the other end of the case is a cardboard ‘luminous trumpet’ and its box, as
sold by the Two Worlds Publishing Co., Manchester, in the 1920s – British made,
5/- post free. These were used in
séances to amplify spirit voices. An
1884 slate bears a fine example of spirit writing obtained through the
mediumship of William Eglinton, and a photograph by William Crawford has Belfast
medium Kathleen Goligher sitting with an ectoplasmic ‘psychic rod’ between her feet. Next door a photograph of Mina Crandon, the
medium ‘Margery’, her face covered
by ectoplasm, is accompanied by three wax impressions of thumb prints taken
during a séance at the SPR’s premises in London in 1929 that were supposedly
from her control, her deceased brother Walter Stinson.

The
paper parts of the Society’s holdings are justly famous for their quality, but
its other possessions are less well known, and this makes their appearance here
noteworthy. A handsome free booklet has
been produced to accompany Curious
Objects with 20 high-quality photographs of some of the choicest; it is
gratifying to see that two are devoted to the SPR’s contribution, the spirit
trumpet and a fine smoky rendition of the Duncan ectoplasm.

It
was one of the conditions in the agreement signed by the SPR’s president and
the Chairman of the Library Syndicate in 1989 to transfer the SPR’s rare books
and archives (other than its audio-visual collection) to Cambridge that CUL
would ‘endeavour during the continuance of this agreement to exhibit Society
materials whenever possible and to arrange special exhibitions of Society
materials as possible.’ This hasn’t
happened much in the decades since so CUL are to be congratulated on making the
SPR such an important element in their anniversary celebration. But don’t just visit Curious Objects (open until 21 March 2017) to see the SPR’s
treasures – there is much here to enjoy.
Entry is free and if you find yourself in Cambridge it is a fine way to
spend an hour, browsing among the stranger things librarians deal with at
work.NB
The web pages set up for the exhibition by the university include two items not
mentioned above. These are a cast of the
left hand of medium D. D. Home, which has been cleverly rendered in 3D so the
viewer can see all round the object; and examples of Harry Price’s ‘Telepatha’
cards with score sheet, his improvement on J. B. Rhine’s Zener cards designed
for use in ESP experiments.These are
not in fact among the artefacts in the display but are illustrated on a panel attached
to the wall next to it.Sadly there was
not enough room in the case to include the objects themselves.The panel, headed ‘Spirits, psychics and
artefacts’, also gives details of the SPR’s origins and its archives and notes
that the Society is still in existence.

Thursday, 13 October 2016

Psychical researchers these days can
utilise a wide range of sophisticated instruments when studying spontaneous
cases (possible ghosts, poltergeists and the like), even if the theoretical
basis for their application is often dubious.But while the power of the equipment at their disposal has increased
enormously over the last decade, attempts to record evidence of paranormal
phenomena have long been an important aspect of the field.A significant figure in applying technology
to the detection and documenting of spontaneous cases was Tony Cornell
(1924-2010), a Cambridge-based researcher with extensive practical experience.In his 2002 book Investigating the Paranormal he discusses extensively the use of
instrumentation and in particular an innovative method for collecting information.This was a piece of kit called the
‘Spontaneous Psychophysical Incident Data Electronic Recorder’, or SPIDER,
which he largely developed with Howard Wilkinson of Nottingham University, and with
input from Alan Gauld, who was also at Nottingham, in trialling it.

There have actually been two separate
versions of SPIDER. The prototype was
put together by Cornell with help from a technician and a computer programmer
in 1982 and was initially housed in a cardboard box. Modifications were made, then Cornell and Wilkinson
unveiled the Mark II, christened SPIDER, in 1984, though Wilkinson continued to
improve it. It is essentially a large
black-painted box, accompanied by a smaller brown chest labelled ‘C.U.S.P.R.
(Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research, a group Cornell ran for
many years), containing an array of devices to monitor an environment. Controlled originally by a 16K ZX Spectrum
computer withDCP
Interspec, relay box and Sinclair printer, it could record motion, temperature changes,
sound and electromagnetic activity, and included floodlights, an audio
recorder, a cine camera (later a camcorder), infrafred video and still 35mm
cameras. These operated for set periods,
as selected, or when initiated by the sensors.
Readings were logged automatically so the equipment could be left to
operate without any supervision for several days.

The editor of mass-circulation magazine Your Computer deemed the project of
sufficient interest to send excitable journalistMeirion Jones to interview
Cornell in his basement HQ in Victoria Street, Cambridge; put Cornell on the
cover, and devote three pages of the May 1983 issue to ‘Captain Spectre and his
Spectrum-powered spook hunt’, though the interview covered more than SPIDER. There was a more sober status update,
co-written by Cornell, in the subsection ‘Notes on the instrumentation of
spontaneous cases’ of the article ‘Research report of the Cambridge University
Society for Psychical Research (CUSPR)’, which appeared in the (national) Society
for Psychical Research’s June 1984 Journal. The total cost to date was put at about £850,
from which it is clear that over the years Cornell sank a considerable amount
of his money into SPIDER.

Cornell used SPIDER on at least a dozen
occasions between 1982 and 1996, amounting to about 1,200 hours, and several of
these are described in his book. The
Mark I was first employed over a six-week period in 1982-3 in an antique shop
storeroom in Cambridge which appeared to be experiencing poltergeist phenomena. SPIDER was then taken to such diverse
locations as Chingle Hall, a Leicestershire stately home, Abbey House in
Cambridge, Stirling Castle, Berry Pomeroy, Chillingham Castle, and others. In 1988 the television network NBC invited Cornell
and Wilkinson to investigate stories of
disturbances on RMS Queen Mary, permanently moored as a tourist attraction in
Long Beach, California, USA, for its series Unsolved
Mysteries (one dreads to think how much the excess baggage charge
was). With poltergeist researcher
William Roll, who brought several mediums with him, they made an extensive
10-day examination of the ship (in addition to Cornell’s chapter on the trip
Roll refers it in his Journal of
Parapsychology review of Investigating
the Paranormal, though with more interest in his own participation than in that
of his English colleagues).

Cornell and Wilkinson, along with a
production company making a television programme, visited the Bell Inn at
Thetford with SPIDER in September 1991 to continue an investigation into a
haunted bedroom, and Cornell spent further time there the following year. In 1994 he returned to the Bell with members
of a group I was in, Norfolk-based ESPRI, for a programme in Inca Productions’
series Ghosthunters. Cornell brought SPIDER with him, but it was
not operational as that would have taken about 90 minutes to organise and the
room was already crowded (and overheated) with people and equipment. Instead only the video cameras and monitors
were set up to simulate how it would look (described by Andy Waters in his 1994
report for the ESPRI newsletter). With
Inca’s cameras rolling Cornell explained the case, I explained how SPIDER
worked, and the group pretended to conduct a vigil. The programme aired in June 1996 but the
ESPRI contributions, including mine, were left out, as was the entire visit
from Cornell’s book.

It probably wouldn’t have made any
difference had SPIDER been operating because little of significance was noted
during the hundreds of hours of SPIDER’s deployment. There were electrical
failures with no apparent cause which rectified themselves, some object
movements which could not be accounted for, and occasional temperature drops
which may have had normal causes, but that was it. However, Wilkinson gave a talk at an SPR
combined study day and training event in 1994 which was reported by Peter Flew
for the SPR’s magazine The Psi Researcher
(forerunner of its current The Paranormal
Review). Wilkinson’s talk, ‘Recording
the evidence’, covered SPIDER, later technical elaborations, and the problems
involved in using electronic equipment on location. He pointed out that a police speed camera
might be trained on a traffic black spot for hundreds of hours before capturing
an accident, and paranormal activity is even rarer than traffic accidents.

Investigating
the Paranormal
contains several pictures of SPIDER: on p. 6; p. 117 (at the Bell); and p. 197
(the Mark I in the antique shop). The Your Computer article is also well
illustrated. It is clear that the boxes are
rather clunky, but as the above account hopefully indicates, SPIDER’s importance
in the evolution of psychical research as a scientific enterprise cannot be
underestimated. Even though superseded
by more complex, and much smaller, gadgets, it is still of historical
significance. So what of SPIDER
now? The two boxes are currently sitting
in a corner of the meeting room in the SPR’s new headquarters at Vernon Mews in
London. That is not a long-term solution
because the space they occupy is required for the installation of AV equipment.
If a home is not found for SPIDER the
chances are it will go into a storage unit where it may deteriorate. It deserves to be where it will be cherished,
and preferably displayed to the public.
A tall order certainly, but if anyone has any thoughts on what can be
done to preserve SPIDER and make sure it is remembered for the pioneering
undertaking it was, I would be interested to hear them.

There has been a surprising development in the
SPIDER saga. It transpires that the
equipment does not actually belong to the SPR!
Through a misunderstanding it was thought that the SPR was to be the
ultimate destination. However, as I have
now learned, ownership in fact passed from Tony Cornell to a third party and
was finally vested in Dr Melvyn Willin, the SPR’s Archives Liaison Officer.

As a result of this misapprehension the Society
thought it had responsibility and was wondering what to do with the big boxes
sitting in its Vernon Mews HQ, but now it can rest easy. Melvyn tells me he is going to collect SPIDER
at some point and take it home where it can be conserved and stored in optimal
conditions.

So for the foreseeable future it is in safe hands, looked
after properly and preserved for future historians as the groundbreaking
initiative it was. I think Tony would
have been pleased with this positive outcome.

Overview

Over the last few years I have written a large number of pieces, mainly reviews on aspects of the paranormal and of visual culture, but many are no longer available. This blog format is a convenient way of putting my bibliography online and adding some of the old items, plus the occasional new one.

A Note on Titles of Publications

The British and Irish Skeptic is now The Skeptic

The Newsletter of the Society for Psychical Research became The Psi Researcher and then The Paranormal Review

Many of the later items are available online, notably those written for nthposition and the SPR website. Those for The Psi Researcher, Paranormal Review and SPR Journal are available in the SPR's online library; see http://www.spr.ac.uk/ for details.